so it’s not just outside trendy cafes and mexican cantinas that you have to queue; friday afternoon at the olde time hopetoun tea rooms in the block arcade, we waited behind the red velvet ropes for 15 minutes or so before a table became available. nevermind — the bejeweled waitress was kind enough to give us frequent updates on the table situation (“there should be people leaving soon, but they are just sitting there sipping at their tea.”), and we had ample time to consider our choices from the two cake-laden shelves in the window. on top: fruit crumbles, tarts of lemon or lime or pecans, teacakes and, yes, macarons…

down below: a spectrum of technicolor cheesecakes, and a couple of sponges layered with cream and festooned with berries and flaked almonds. inside, perched atop the counter, above a display of antique silver and heavy crystal, sticky date puddings with a towering jug of toffee sauce, caramel slices, and chocolate and strawberry swiss rolls. it really was quite overwhelming.

i’d been working myself up to a simple afternoon tea of scones and cream and jam, but as we approached the front of the queue, the thought of two lumps of breadiness sitting in my belly so close to dinnertime saw me veer towards a slice of the sunny orb of passionfruit tart in the corner of the window.

at our cosy table in the small and tightly packed dining room, i found that the filling was, as i had hoped, bright and tangy, but the pastry, though a fetching shade of golden brown, was much less crisp than i would have liked. it had a lovely buttery taste, but its texture lacked any real distinction from that of the passionfruit curd.

both my tart and the slice of pavlova that the kid picked to celebrate the last day of term were thoughtfully plated up with artful puddles of passionfruit and/or raspberry coulis, dollops of thick cream and extra bits of fruit. but i must say that the attention to detail might have extended, if not to removing the skin from the kiwifruit, then at least to removing the stickers from the kiwifruit skin. gah!

the tea service, when it first arrived, looked promising despite the splodge of red jam on the strainer. alas, my dahl house tea — black, flavoured with ginger and peach — was served with a litter of leaves on the floor of the pot, so while the first cup was light and fragrant, by the third cup, it had brewed itself bitter.

i’d really like to like this place. i mean, i’d like to like it more. i mean, i think, i like it fine. the waitresses are friendly, and will not rush you on even though a queue is forming outside. the decor, with the marble table tops, emerald green wallpaper and swathes of stripy fabric hanging from the rafters, is not without its charm. when you look closely though, at the lingering produce stickers, and the just-short-of-soggy pastry, and the endlessly steeping tea, and the torn and peeling wallpaper, you get a sad little feeling that this is not so much the grande dame of tea rooms as it is the slightly doddery aunt.

(which is not to say i wouldn’t visit again. because after all, who doesn’t like a homely tea-and-cake sit down with a doddery aunt in her well-worn sitting room? it’s just a little bit of pomp and some tired splendour. perhaps next time, i will have the scones.)

i remember seeing coverage of skye gyngell’s pop-up cafe at the good food affare in sydney the other year. i remember being perplexed by the hay-strewn floor, and confounded by the collection of twee tchotkes on display. having now experienced petersham nurseries, it’s finally all become clear.

the running joke between my sister and her friend about the curation of old stuff piled just so around the nursery, is that someone goes around with a label gun, and randomly sticks price tags on everything. that tarnished mirror? £14,000. that rusty old hoe? £600.

but it was an intriguing wander through the various tents and sheds, admiring dusty antiques and the new things that just looked old. i especially liked the baskets (and baskets) of handy utilitarian brushes. a different one for every task imaginable.

the pastiche of skye’s cafe at the good food affare just pales in comparison. i believe all the stuff on display — the garden furniture with the perfect patina; the shabby chic chandeliers; the bottle green etched drinking glasses — could be purchased from the homewares giant who put on the show. it irritates me just thinking about it.

anyway. bear with me. it’s just some background colour to the preceding post. and besides, who doesn’t like tulips?

this year, cockatoo island is one of the venues of the biennale of sydney, and a free ferry service will shuttle you between circular quay and the island. it is a very, very cute little ferry, crafted of wood a long time ago, and painted a fetching combo of milky coffee and raspberry jam. you see where this is going?

yes! we went to cockatoo island! me, and the kid, and two of my cousins, to see art! well, ok, i actually wanted to see the island, but what better way to lure some long-lost cousins, with at least one ex-arts-journalist among them, than with the promise of some world class contemporary art?

so under the bright blue sky, we caught the cutest, and slowest, ferry in the world to cockatoo island. us and a big, fat chorizo baguette, and a tub of marinated mushroom salad, and a tub of bacon fried rice (fried in butter! it was proclaimed as the tub hit the picnic table), and a cereal bar. but i am getting ahead of myself.

we got off the ferry, and it was like we had arrived at the land where time stood still (except for the understated but exceedingly modern cafe right next to the wharf)… in the middle of a wind storm. sand and dust whipped around us at a terrific speed, and we walked backwards into the wind to keep the dust from our eyes. truly, it seemed like we were elements in an enormous installation. we gamely explored a few buildings, each of which housed a single artist’s grand statement: one of the statements was racist graffiti scrawled all over the walls of a historical toilet block. another, banks of tv monitors screening footage of… well, i didn’t pay too much attention, but i’m guessing it was something to do with the weather, given the name of the collective responsible. there was a lot of video art.

after we succeeded in fighting our way to the end of the second wind tunnel (not the one in which a dramatic soundscape had been installed, oh no.) and discovered a shiny new sheltered structure with picnic benches (and BBQ hot plates and a microwave and fridge, if you’re interested), we claimed this little sliver of the island, and sat there for as long as we could, until the wind had died down, and we no longer felt like cousins who had not really seen much of one another in twenty years.

[ nothing like a dose of painfully didactic modern art to make us go all breakfast club. ]

and yet, after our windswept luncheon, faced with the choice of catching the next ferry back to civilisation, or venturing out to the higher ground, we picked: more art. because, y’know, i thought we might feel a sense of regret about what might have been, had we jumped (on the) ship. and behold, in one of the charmingly scruffy buildings up on the hill, i came across this amazing, perforated cork-tiled wall in a kitchen corridor leading into yet another video installation.

but look at it, look! so great.

possibly the best thing i saw on the island.

that hour to the next boat passed surprisingly quickly. we stumbled upon the education centre, channelling scandinavia with its glorious natural light, and wide open space, and neat modern furniture (and banks of video screens). and before we knew it, there was just enough time to scramble down the hill right as the ferry pulled up.

around the wharf, the air was rich with the greasy smell of fat, fried chips. and — whether it was placed serendipitously or by design — that sticker in the window of the vandalised toilet block? pretty much summed up this portion of the biennale, for me.

the island though, that was great.

fucken tired and shit.

this time last week… well, see now, i started off saying “last week”, and then it hit me that it was actually two weeks ago. crap. so this time two weeks ago, i was calling ’round likely candidates, trying to give away a spare ticket i had to the v festival.

which is harder than you’d think, even if it was two days out from the darned thing. in the end though, maybe i was just not meant to get rid of it. saturday, as i walked up to the gates, dressed in my best muji shirt, with an on-the-way bourke street bakery lamb-and-harissa sausage roll under my belt, and the scalper with the slimy, solicitous air muttered, “tickets? anyone got tickets to sell?”, i hesitated just a beat too long, and the moment was gone. me and my spare ticket and VIP wristband were sailing through the bagchecks, going it alone.

which, as it turns out, is not a bad way to go. i squeezed down the front of hot hot heat, i trudged to this, that and the other stage on a whim, and when whimsy got too much, i found a shady spot in the grass for myself, my “new yorker” and a quite delicious veggie sandwich which i’d thought to get at bourke street bakery some hours before to save me from having to eat the hodge-podge of stodge that is festival food.

(funny the way you have to go to a big rock show sometimes, to get a quiet moment to yourself.)

i was killing time until the main event, really. to me, that was queens of the stone age. as evening fell, along with a light drizzle, and the beast of a drummer kicked in… OH it was great! you know… when the crowd seizes up, and you feel it in the back of your neck. it was that kind of great, monstrous rock.

and maybe it’s a sign that i’m too old for outdoor rock festivals, but there were not too many moments of greatness that day, inbetween the trudging from stage to stage. duran duran were not great, but then again i was never a duranite back in the day. rosin murphy was pretty great, with her costume changes at each song and her funny, dramatic dance moves, and her funny, wonderful backing singers. smashing pumpkins started off great, with a lilting guitar anda wistful “today is the greatest day i’ve ever known…”, but then three songs in i remembered why i don’t listen at length to the pumpkins. the whining, the whining does not end.

and so (she whines), i left. i beat the mass exodus, and i caught a cab to my palatial bedroom at the vibe hotel in rushcutters bay, where i ordered copious amounts of room service and fell asleep in crisp white linens.

you are thinking, this is strange. why is she off to rock shows, and spending nights in hotels,and where is her kid? but i assure you, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. the kid had been deposited that morning with her doting aunties and smitten boy cousin for a day (and a night) of belated easter eggs, and vegemite sandwiches, and portuguese cakes, and as little as she could eat of a home-cooked corned beef and white sauce. and i, i had won a prize — the subscription prize, and who ever wins those? — from time out sydney magazine, of festival tickets, and VIP passes (read: clean toilets), and a night in a hotel, and a spankin’ new mobile phone, and spankin’ new phone credit.

(now there’s a moment of greatness right there. although the collective two hours that i spent on the phone with three or four of virgin mobile’s finest offshore call centre personnel, trying to convince them that i really had won a phone off virgin-sponsored competition, and that i hadn’t stolen someone else’s phone whose details were on file as the registered owner of the SIM card, and that they should please, please let me have goddamn access to my account, please… that was really not very great at all.)

but so, i was famished from seven hours of v fest on nothing more than a sausage roll and a veggie sandwich. and so, i ordered up big — so big, i thought, that i was surprised and a little bit embarrassed when the food showed up and they’d only included one set of cutlery.

i had chips, of course, because you must have room service chips, and these were pretty good chips, all crunchy and golden and fat. i ate many of these before i even tasted the duck salad, which i’d ordered out of curiosity, because the description on the menu read: seared duck with lychee, capsicum and watercress salad, with raspberry vinaigrette. the duck was not seasoned, except for the crisp skin, which was, aggressively. the salad was two bitey and mismatched flavours of watercress and capsicum — diced, and in three colours. the lychees strewn over the top seemed mismatched to that, and the raspberry vinaigrette was…um… sour?

fortunately, i got dessert too, because i was hungry at the time. but the vanilla bean ice cream was mostly melted by the time i got to it — it had been delivered sitting atop the warm duck — so i drank that with a spoon, and then i was much too full to have more than a taste of the belgian chocolate mousse.

so i had it for breakfast. rock!

the kid has not been playing fair of late. dropping of naptime aside, the deal is that i take her out to fun places and buy her treats, and in return she is sweet and docile and generally nice. i’m even happy, in principle, for her to set the itinerary. playground? cafe? that shop over there full of fun kitchen things? yup! these days she wakes up in the morning, and her first words are, “where are we going?”. really.

however, on recent excursions, she has been cheery only up until the part where i gaze across at something that might solely interest me. at this point, she will become most floppy and whiney, and she will say things about wanting to go outside now. there may even be grunting!

i know it’s all part of growing her own personality, but bloody hell it’s getting tedious. this afternoon, after a bus ride back from the city, she chose going to the newsagent with me rather than following her dad home. the newsagent by the busstop has decreed every saturday and sunday, “magazine day”; all magazines are 20% off. this is almost as good as a national public holiday to me. as soon as i flipped open the cover of “vogue”, the kid ran up the aisle and said that she had to go to the toilet right away.

i was extremely furious. extreme furiousity! this entailed grabbing her hand, and walking super fast across the street, past the church, down the hill, only pausing a moment when she stumbled, and not at all when the loosely-knotted balloon string came away from her wrist and drifted off into the blue with her bright pink xmas balloon. we had been to the david jones xmas concert in hyde park earlier in the day, a travesty of shrek in a santa suit.

but there was no jolly hoho left. there were tears (hers) and slamming of doors (mine). and after her dad took over and wiped her bottom and read her a book and put her to bed, he said that maybe i could go out and play by myself tomorrow. he went out himself then, to the beach and a barbeque and a night off, and the kid slept for three hours until i roused her. she was a different child then, sweet, docile and generally nice.

i don’t get too much work done these days. i don’t seem to get much of anything done, actually, except keeping the kid entertained. the two or three hours after she goes to bed for the night… i am torn between work, and this blog, and comic artists rehab. and on nights like this one, when the sofa upstairs is vacant, there is also “gilmore girls” to contend with. who’s winning tonight? not work. blog — well, i could write another post, but i won’t. i posted a comic today, so i won’t have to again until wednesday. so.

hey, did you know gingerbread frappucini are back in season? i think it would be the perfect accompaniment to the biscuit factory exhibition. only a day away…

um, so, i don’t get to vote, because i’m not a citizen, and i’m not a citizen because the last time i tried to become one a couple years ago, the beryl on the phone said that since i didn’t have the very passport stamped when i first landed on these fair shores over twenty years ago, my application would be incomplete. and if i want to become a citizen now, i’d have to take the goddamned citizenship test. it’s not enough i pay taxes? huh?? turns out beryl was talking out her old, shrivelled-up ass anyway. perhaps she’s even drafted some of the questions on the test!

krispy kreme does not fly such an exclusionary flag. happy to take votes from anyone, they are offering free doughnuts for australia the day after election day, if you register to vote on their site. free doughnuts, folks!

[ or, as free as it gets with an "invitation" to make a "donation" for every doughnut... proceeds help out the salvos, but golly, they sure got that hidden-worm-behind-the-election-promise thing worked out ]

“what are you doing?”

“working…”

“oh, that’s good!”

“hmm. you say it’s good, but you don’t know that the work is stupid, and the pay could be better.”

“then you are undercharging. you need to charge more.”

“but when you work for a non-profit organisation, you can’t charge normal, commercial rates.”

“then you can’t always work for non-profit organisations. don’t you want to work for a real company?”

“wellll. if i worked in a commercial setup i wouldn’t be able to stay home and look after a kid all day.”

“ah. you have a point,” he said, then, “where is the kid?”

“she’s gone on holidays.”

“what!? so why aren’t you there with her?”

“um, because i have to work?”

“but don’t you miss her?”

“no.”

“what!? why not!?”

“because, when you spend 24 hours a day looking after someone…”

“ah. i see.”

“and i have so much work to do. i mean, it is tricky to balance the work, and the kid –”

“that’s what life is all about, finding the balance.”

hungh.

another ridiculous thing i encountered earlier this week are the all-round party spoons from jamie oliver’s “easy entertaining” range for royal worcester, marked down at the david jones easter sale from $30 to $15. for six “oriental spoons” in a box. the catalogue pictures shows nine, which means a box and a half. (why do people serve food in these soup spoons anyway? why don’t they stop??)

don’t they know you can go to any chinatown supermarket, walk down the kitchenware aisle, and avail yourself of as many of these spoons as you care to, for about 70c a piece? maybe a dollar for one with a finer finish. the trendy homeware stores do the same trick with bamboo steamers: $30 for something that will cost you $5 at a neighbourhood “ethnic” shop. what has multiculturalism achieved, if not to bring affordable cooking utensils to the general populace?

ri.di.culo.us.

i turned on my phone yesterday evening after recharging it, and a txt came through from ’round about lunchtime: i am staying with my parents until i decide where to go next.

a txt, for fuck’s sake.

i decided not to call for thai home delivery; we had scrambled eggs and grilled tomatoes on toast instead.

- “indifference“, pearl jam

1. there is a very nice waiter at the lindt cafe, who looks like orlando bloom. i’ve never had a thing for orlando bloom, but it worked really well for the waiter. the babycino at the lindt cafe is quite special: an espresso glass with a puddle of dark chocolate below, and then pure white milk and a pillowy crema, topped with a generous shaving of dark chocolate. a thing of beauty, and free. after the kid wiped half of the chocolate on her face onto my shirt, orlando bloom came by and said to her: “i don’t mean to embarrass you, but you have a little something on your face.” he gestured a circle around his mouth. then she threw her sippy cup on the floor so that he would have to retrieve it for her. this is how a two-year-old flirts, apparently. from next week, the lindt cafe is open sundays.

2. when we go out for a walk, the three of us, and i am holding maeve’s hand and walking at her pace, the boy’s long legs prevent him from keeping to this pace, and he has no choice but to walk about three metres in front of us. every now and again he will stop to wait for us to catch up, but then his legs get in the way again, and not a minute later we will have fallen behind. when called on this, he will claim that it is not his fault. after all, he is not expecting me to match his pace; i am free to walk as slowly as i like behind him. i just like to get angry at things, expecting that he walk alongside us. i have a very bad temper to throw a tantrum over nothing.